"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

U. S. Chamber of Horrors Bringing Its Brand of Destruction to MA Schools

If you thought that states with gubernatorial stooges controlled by the Koch-Heads were the only ones set on destroying their public education systems and other public institutions, think again. Here in the Commonwealth where there is darker hue to Blue, the Business Roundtable, the Broadies, the Boston Foundation, and other lower forms of corporate hangers-on are staging an all-out push to destroy the public teaching profession with the same kind of anti-scientific and test score based teacher evaluations that we see being pushed in red state Indiana, Tennessee, or Utah.

Despite the warnings by leading scholars and the National Research Council, no less, the U. S. Chamber of Horrors and their billions directed by their Business Roundtable have bought their way to the front of the line (hell, they've bought the line) in public policy-making even in home state of Horace Mann, where public education began and where it has flourished, except for the poor, of course.

Despite the fact that Massachusetts NAEP scores are at the highest levels in the nation, and despite the fact that Massachusetts students' international test scores are among the best in the world, the fools, charlatans, and control freak Harvard toadies hired by Death Chamber are pushing hard to make test scores even more central to what schools do, thus pushing critical thinking about pressing social and ecological issues further into the background than they are now. This is all part of the same coordinated national effort to distract effort away from issues that, if addressed, could affect the bottom lines of the dirty energy giants and the sludge funders of Wall Street who are driving the Chamber of Horrors' agenda, which is, in fact, a social agenda.

The price to pay if the death-worshipping sociopaths of the Chamber go unchecked? If the Spirit of Cairo and Madison do not run these scoundrels into a Caribbean or Swiss exile (or better yet, lock them up like the Mubarak boys)? The price to pay will be the final generations of a human civilization that was miseducated to embrace their own demise, to think positive about the end of the world as we know it, to keep order as the ecological apocalypse closed in, to support the corporate state and the final wars to corner the remaining resources as the oceans die.

In Massachusetts, as elsewhere, civil disobedience must take hold on a large scale, with demonstrations, boycotts, and mass strikes by teachers and students and parents and grandparents. Boycotting the corporate rag and official organ of the Death Chamber, the Boston Globe, would be a great first step. There is no worse example of public irresponsibility in the media--well, maybe Fox--but that's not media, just sordid entertainment.

Any newspaper that would label the NCTQ as a non-partisan research outfit, as the Globe has done in cheerleading for the new evaluation scheme, is too owned by the corporations to even make a distinction between partisan and non-partisan. When both sides of the aisle of the same corporate jet are drinking the same champagne, what does partisan really mean, anyway? About the same thing that it means in China. Too bad there is not a Pulitzer for the most consistent editorializing within news stories--James Vaznis would be a shoo-in.

There is much educational work and organizing to be done if the world is to avoid catastrophe. Much resistance to be swept aside, pushed into the ditch, left behind. We have less than two decades to turn this rusting, smelly, smoking multi-national corporate ship. We cannot be complicit in our demise or that of our children. Action now or never. Stop the Corporate Takeover of Massachusetts Schools! That's a step that must be taken.